


On Trial

by sigo



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Armitage Hux Lives, Armitage Hux is Not Nice, Ben Solo Lives, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Established Relationship, Execution, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Kylo Ren is Not Nice, Manipulative Kylo Ren, No MCD, Not Beta Read, Nothing sacred is here, Phasma Lives (Star Wars), Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Prison, Rape/Non-con Elements, Trials, mentioned execution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-16
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-13 18:33:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28782750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sigo/pseuds/sigo
Summary: It is the third day of the trial of the Galactic Republic against General Armitage Hux, the Starkiller./ twitfic adapted to ao3 because I needed the ability to tag content warnings. See tags.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren
Comments: 12
Kudos: 67





	On Trial

**Author's Note:**

> TW details in bottom notes. Not beta'd. There's no active smut but its rated explicit for mentioned past sex.

It is the third day of the trial of the Galactic Republic against General Armitage Hux, the Starkiller. Court is in session on Coruscant, not within the Senate chambers but inside the prison building itself. A large all-white administrative room emptied out and repurposed quickly, the furnishings of a typical courtroom constructed in austere white inside especially for Hux. He can still smell the paint touch-ups made to the walls. Hux is too high-profile to risk transport to trial. Cam-droids hover, quietly whirring, swooping around the periphery of the room to zoom in on faces. The trial has been televised on nearly every channel the galactic holofeed supports, and probably most holonet sites as well.

Witnesses have been called to the stand, looking down on Hux with fear or contempt, or a heady mixture of both. Hosnian refugees. Ex-troopers, or the parents of stolen children now disappeared into the faceless ranks of Hux’s military, many of them dead. Gunned down in support of Hux’s cause. His war. For the length of the trial up to this point, Hux has been by turns smug and seething. He snarls when asked to speak, or smiles cruelly back up at his tearful accusers. His pale green gaze is sharp, penetrating. Witnesses and jurors alike shrink from him. He is the picture of a remorseless killer.

Why grovel? The people of the galaxy clamor for the blood of the Starkiller, and they will get their way. No life sentence, even in the darkest and coldest prisons in the Outer Rim, is satisfactory punishment for the likes of Hux, who reduced trillions to stardust with a single command. Hux can’t beg his life back. It is in the hands of the Republic, and this unsteady new democracy will lose its footing if they misstep here, on the crumbling ledge of Hux’s atrocities. No, there’s no way out. So Hux will go into death with the same straight spine and level gaze he held in life. He’s determined to.

Today, Hux is guided to his defendant seat as usual. Before the trial began, he was clothed in an ill-fitting and stained white prison shirt and pants, and denied access to a proper refresher. He’d grown orange stubble and left his hair unwashed, hardly looking himself. Hardly feeling himself. Freshening up at last was a strange sort of pleasure. Hux knows he’s only been allowed to shower and shave under supervision, and only been given a new freshly-pressed and pristine uniform the last few days, because his captors do not want his appearance to evoke sympathy. It's a tactic to increase the visual evidence of Hux’s guilt. Hux can’t find it within himself to mind -- he’d rather be hated than vulnerable.

Hux lowers himself carefully into place, the mag-binders around his wrists clanking with the metal bar they’re attached to by a ring, running up to a brace around Hux’s middle, attached to another bar, then to a collar around his throat. The contraption forces his hands down away from his face and restricts his movement severely.

The judge calls the court to order and repeats the same drivel from the last two days. Hux’s name, birthplace, rank in the First Order, and his species. Half human, half humanoid native Arkanan.  _ That _ had caused quite the stir on the first day. People cast xenophobic aspersions onto Hux, what they think he stands for, and xeno half-breed status doesn’t match up. They are unable to separate the First Order from the Empire, just like foolish Imperials themselves. Just the same. The judge calls for the first witness of the day to take the stand.

“Ben Solo.”

Hux’s eyes snap up. He’d been resolutely studying the plastisteel table in front of him as a droid hovered beside him, performing real-time analytics on his microexpressions to display to the viewers of some news channel or another. Now, he looks at ‘Ben’. It’s nearly possible not to think of the man taking the witness stand as Kylo Ren. He is still tall and broad, but carries himself differently. Whether it is simply his stooped posture, or he’s been prohibited from training, Kylo seems smaller somehow. Small, for Kylo, is still enormous. He’s wearing light Jedi garb, and his scar is completely gone. Healed-over long after scar tape should have lost its use to him. He’s braided his hair back on top, another obvious call toward his heritage. He’s gotten some sun on this planet, unlike Hux. It gives his skin color and life, renders his hair chestnut instead of ink-black. He looks good. Better than the last time Hux saw him, donning that foolish reforged helmet. Not as good as he always looked in Hux’s sheets.

Hux looks at Kylo looking at him. He knows what Kylo sees. No obvious bruises aside from a yellow shadow across Hux’s right cheekbone -- the guard who hit him there was removed from circulation in Hux’s cell block. The ones who take shots at his legs or middle, where fabric covers him, keep their posting. Hux is still just as thin and pale as he always was, that thinness on full display in his short-sleeved white shirt. Hux has his hair brushed back today, instead of hanging down in his face. He looks almost like the General he was. There is the same steel in his eyes. There is additional steel encircling his body.

Kylo puts a hand up, palm out, and swears to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. He swears on the Force itself, his religion. There are no binders on his wrists, but a thin white tracking beacon encircles his left forearm, the dim light on it blinking steadily. He isn't free completely. Not yet.

The scavenger girl and the traitorous FN unit enter next, standing below the judge. As on previous days, they will verify the truth of everything said. They put hands on Hux’s skin when they peer into his mind. A hand on his bare forearm. He dislikes it. He’s always disliked being touched unasked. He wonders whether they need to do it to read him. If so, they aren’t as powerful as Kylo. But perhaps it's only for show. More theatre for the cam-droids.

The judge continues to call Kylo ‘Ben’ as he asks his questions. Kylo doesn’t object to it. His face doesn’t sour like it used to when Snoke would dredge the name up from the polluted waters of his past like something sharp and rusted to slice him with. Hux stares at him, looking for a tic. A tell. Waiting for the corners of his eyes to tighten or the muscle of his jaw to work reflexively as Kylo swallows.

“Did Armitage Hux assist you to meet the being known as Snoke’s demands?”

“Yes.”

Hux listens, not breaking eye contact with Kylo as questions and answers cycle like Starkiller’s oscillator. Kylo’s fate has been opaque to Hux before now, though he suspected Kylo had come out of Exegol on better footing. Call it intuition. Hux learns now that Kylo has pinned all his misdeeds on Snoke. Clever. Kylo always had a knack for manipulation. He knows how to use that boyish charm.

“Do you testify that Armitage Hux himself conceived, designed, and oversaw the construction of the weapon known as Starkiller Base?”

“Yes.”

“Did Armitage Hux himself order the firing of this weapon on the Hosnian system?”

Kylo falters. His eyes flicker away, to the girl, to the cam-droids, then back to Hux. “Snoke,” he says. “Snoke ordered Starkiller’s firing.”

Hux keeps his face neutral, but something inside him wakes up and stretches, growing alert. This is not precisely true. Snoke granted permission for Hux to proceed, at most. Hux tries to x-ray Kylo with his eyes, wishing not for the first time that he had similar power. What he would give to see into Kylo’s mind. To know for certain whether a spark of hope in this moment is utter folly.

“Are you implying that the firing of Starkiller Base would have occurred without Armitage Hux’s direct involvement?”

Kylo bites his plush lower lip. He looks unhappy. “No.”

“Do you testify that Armitage Hux as the designer and commander of Starkiller Base was the central, if not sole, cause of the weapon’s firing on and annihilation of the Hosnian system in its entirety, and the extinguishing of five trillion lives along with it?”

“Yes.”

The next question concerns Kylo alone, as if he were the one in Hux’s place. By rights he should be. He should be seated next to Hux, the both of them fated to hang together. “Did the being known as Snoke willingly and knowingly coerce you into working alongside the First Order?”

“Yes.”

“Did the human-Arkanan hybrid known as Armitage Hux willingly and knowingly coerce you into working alongside the First Order?”

Kylo looks at Hux. Hux could drown in those honeyed brown eyes. “Yes,” Kylo says.

“Lies,” Hux objects, incensed.  _ You chose it. You chose it as much as I did. Maybe more _ . He’s spoken out of turn. The judge bangs his gavel and warns Hux sternly that further interruptions will result in him being gagged unless expected to answer a direct question.

Kylo leaves the witness stand, moving to another seat on Hux’s level of the room. He’s next to Poe Dameron, who does not look entirely put out to be sitting next to Kylo Ren. Dameron claps Kylo on one broad shoulder. “You’re doing good, Benny,” he stage-whispers. Poe Dameron is not capable of real whispering.

Hux catches Kylo’s eye again as the next witness is brought forward. ‘Benny?’ Hux mouths at him, exaggerating it. Kylo’s face twists in a familiar sulk. The guard next to Hux bodily forces his face forward again, facing the judge and witness stand. Phasma is there, unarmored and definitely skinnier than she used to be. Her blonde curls are cropped short. She’s in a white prison uniform and bound in durasteel, like Hux. She cannot raise her palm when she swears to tell the truth. She swears on no religion.

“Delphine Phasma of Parnassos. Do you testify….”

The questions drone on and on. Phasma answers in clipped yes or no’s, never extrapolating. She looks tired. Hux wonders whether they wake her when she sleeps like they do him. She is less accustomed to a lack of sleep than Hux is.

“Did the being known as Snoke have undue and malicious influence over Ben Solo?”

Hux snaps back to the present. Another question about Kylo. Kylo was on trial here, too, in a way. Shuffled into the edge of Hux’s proceedings. Perhaps Mon Mothma forbade a direct trial of Leia Organa’s only child.

“I can’t rightly say, your honor,” Phasma says haltingly, caught off guard.

“Did Armitage Hux have undue and malicious influence over Ben Solo?”

Hux senses Kylo coming to attention behind him, focused on Phasma. Hux himself is doing the same -- sitting up straighter, waiting.

“No,” says Phasma, her voice stronger than before. Clear. “They were co-commanders for six years, and then Kylo Ren was Supreme Leader. General Hux served under him at the Battle of Exegol.”

“Do you have evidence?”

Phasma raises an eyebrow. “Evidence that they were co-commanders?”

“Evidence that Armitage Hux did  _ not  _ assert malicious influence over Ben Solo.”

_ They’re asking her to prove my innocence _ . Hux bites his tongue to keep from laughing at the absurdity of it. The Republic believes itself justice incarnate, and here Hux sits. Declared guilty until proven otherwise. Not that there isn’t a wealth of evidence stacked against him. It’s only the principle of the thing. Phasma looks at him, her cool blue eyes searching for permission that Hux cannot give without being sanctioned for insubordination in the courts. She makes her decision.

“General Hux and Kylo Ren maintained an intimate relationship,” Phasma says slowly, her voice steady. The room quiets further, everyone listening. A cam-droid zooms in its lens, clicking metallica. “Outside the bounds of the First Order. They both spoke to me personally about it on multiple occasions, apart from each other.”

“Ah,” says the senator who had asked, looking flustered. The assembled jurors eye each other, murmuring. The senator continues. “And the particulars of this...intimate relationship were--”

“They fucked,” says Phasma. Someone coughs. “With regularity. Kylo slept in the General’s quarters. He went there after he trained in the gym every evening and he joined me at the General’s door to go and spar every morning.”

People shift in their seats, whispering, turning to look at Kylo. Hux does the same, and the guard at his side doesn’t yank him back. Kylo’s face is openly dismayed. He always  _ was _ expressive.

_ Didn’t tell them THAT before they let you out into the sun, did you? _ Hux thought darkly.

The next senator’s voice wavers on their question, feeling out the shape of it as they speak it into existence. “Phasma of Parnassos, do you testify that Armitage Hux and Ben Solo...held a relationship...of a romantic nature?”

Phasma shrugs, waits a beat, and then says, “Yes. I believe so.” She looks at Hux.  _ Romantic _ . Hux never said that to her, not in those words. But actions can be even more damning. The judge motions and Finn walks over to the witness stand, touching Phasma’s lowered hands with an expression on his face like he’d rather touch bog water.

“Truth,” Finn says, pulling away eagerly. Gasps ring out. The judge shakes his head and motions again. Rey repeats the test, and the answer.

“She’s telling the truth.”

The room is getting loud, the level of conversation no longer quiet when so many voices are murmuring. The judge bangs his gavel once and calls Ben Solo back up to the stand. Kylo goes, his cheeks tinged pink and lips pouty. Hux can imagine how much Kylo hates this. Being the center of so much focused attention, and forced to play along in the pageant. That was always Hux’s forte. Kylo is much more suited to wanton destruction than delicate politics. But he is not incapable.

  
  


Kylo takes the stand, looking down at the jurors, at the spectators and cam-droids beyond broadcasting his image out to the galaxy. No, not his. Ben’s. Ben Solo, son of the late General Leia Organa and smuggler Han Solo. He looks the part now, more so than he did even in his troubled youth. He looks at the faces staring up at him in shock, having just learnt that this fragile vision of the newly-redeemed Ben Solo spent his nights tangled up in the Starkiller’s sheets. The tracking beacon on his arm pulses gently, reminding him it’s there. If this goes sour Kylo won’t have to worry about that beacon any longer. They’ll throw him in a cell, parentage be damned. And any hope of freedom will die with that.

There must be a way. A way to come out of this unscathed, not that Kylo deserves it. He’s made a habit of taking what he wants, deserved or not, and he won’t stop now. Not when he’s so close. Anything is preferable to the inside of a cell. From the outside, Kylo has power. He can work his way back into the good graces of the Republic, and then…. The future is formless.

A senator approaches. “Ben Solo, did you maintain a romantic relationship with Armitage Hux?”

“No,” says Kylo, and it isn’t precisely a lie. There were no ‘I love you’s. No dates. No exotic flora in vases. Well, Kylo did bring Hux fruit from planetary missions. But no flowers. And Hux hardly ever deigned to eat the fruit, complaining fondly that Kylo was apt to poison him either on purpose or by accident.  _ Romantic _ doesn’t eclipse the whole of it. There is not a suitable word in basic for the type of connection that is forged between souls when a man shows you the first and only unlikely tenderness you’ve ever known.

Ben’s upbringing was stark and stifled, emotion and attachment nonexistent in his empty home while Leia worked in the senate and Han trawled the galaxy for underhanded work, and then expressly forbidden under Luke’s teachings. And then under Snoke’s. Let go of any feeling softer than rage. Sever all attachments. They weaken you. Until.

Until Hux. Their trysts had started rough, and Kylo justified them to himself that way. When he shoved Hux into a storage closet and pushed him into the wall and devoured him, and Hux bit him back...surely if pain makes one stronger in the Dark Side, the pain of a split lip counts, no matter the source. Kylo sidled up to the edge of attachment with Hux slowly, the both of them circling each other like predators, and then they fell over all at once and there was no crawling back out. Kylo knew Hux felt the same for him. He wandered in and out of the man’s mind at his leisure. Truth be told, Kylo couldn’t have abided by it if Hux were less invested than he. But Hux wasn’t. Hux was just as unutterably obsessed with Kylo, and that sealed Kylo’s fate. He had, in all his twenty-some years of life, never built up any defense at all against sincere adoration. Tasting it in Hux’s mind was like injecting the purest form of spice into his bloodstream. From the first hit, Kylo had been doomed. And even worse, Hux was in the same predicament. No one had ever touched him without hurting until Kylo. Kylo saw in Hux’s mind that he had always feared an outstretched hand in childhood, certain that this blow would be the one that killed him. As their frenzied couplings slowed, hands gripping without bruising, Hux melted. Kylo’s big hands roamed Hux’s skinny frame, mapping him out, memorizing him. Learning which touches drew mesmerizing bitten-off sounds from Hux’s lips.

And Hux returned the favor, dragging Kylo into his quarters one evening and undressing him completely, kissing every single dark mole on his skin. After his first night in Hux’s quarters, Kylo seldom left. There were no vows. Perhaps it hadn’t been love, but if so, it was something dangerously close. It had been... _ domestic _ . Kylo knew intimately the sound of Hux washing his face and brushing his teeth at night. He knew the weight of Hux beside him on the mattress. Even after Crait, Hux hadn’t banished Kylo from his quarters for long. When Hux welcomed Kylo back into bed and took Kylo’s cock into his mouth at last, ending that particular dry spell, he had sucked, hollowing his cheeks, and then pulled off and said, “ _ Supreme Leader _ ,” in that way he did that turned it into an insult, and Kylo had come immediately. He’d gotten it in one of Hux’s frosty green eyes, and endured the storm of cursing that followed.

“Did you maintain a sexual relationship with Armitage Hux?”

Kylo blinked. “Yes.”

“This is new information,” said the judge wearily, raising his gavel. “This court will adjourn, and meet again. In the meantime, Ben Solo will be kept under the custody of the Republic--”

“Wait,” Kylo blurted, heart racing. “I was groomed.” This, too, is not a lie. Nothing could be more true of Kylo’s time under Snoke’s fist than that short statement. Even in his own mind, Kylo knows that it doesn’t excuse the massacres, the murders. How many children are groomed into violence without reveling in it like Kylo did? Like he does. Like he now abstains from as if pushing away a hungered-after dessert? There’s an army’s worth of troopers, for one, that never stiffened in their uniforms as they ended a life. The jurors turn and whisper to each other, and the susurrus travels through the whole room. Eyes widen. Mouths open into shocked O’s.

The Pantoran senator questioning Kylo raises her voice to be heard. “Do you mean to state that your sexual relationship with Armitage Hux was maintained between the two of you against your will, Ben Solo?”

Kylo looks at her. He looks at Hux, whose face is blank. The incredible weight of both their crimes cannot be laid against Snoke. Kylo has tried that. Hux is destined for a return to his cell anyway, after Hosnian Prime. He will have to bear more than his fair share of Kylo’s wickedness for the good of the both of them. If Kylo is outside, if he is at least partially free, he can advocate for Hux. Kylo knows he’s only justifying the sin he’s about to commit.

“Yes,” he says. The room erupts. Cam-droids click, adjusting their displays.

“That’s not true,” Hux snaps, speaking out of turn again. HIs demeanor has changed completely. Every hint of dark amusement is gone from his face and frame. There’s the beginning of cold panic in his eyes. The guard next to him fits the transparent gag in their hands over Hux’s face and it clicks and whirs, contouring its silencing material to the lines of his jaw, covering his mouth against further interruptions as promised.

Murmured conversations rise in volume, booming in the vaulted white space of the makeshift courtroom. Before the judge bangs his gavel, Kylo hears him comment snidely that Brendol Hux’s escaped prisoner, a Resistance pilot now deceased, made a similar claim against him. That she’d even carried Brendol’s child, now the accused, to term. Kylo knows Hux heard the judge too. Hux’s face is white. Whiter than usual, tinged almost gray. He looks as fragile as glass in his white uniform, skinny bare arms on display, hair raised in the chill of the room. There’s a purple bruise peeking out from one sleeve. Kylo wants to savage the man that put that mark on Hux. The desire is ironic. Misplaced. Kylo is hurting Hux far worse. The judge has to call for order more than once. The court is in an uproar. People are standing up in their seats. Phasma stands and shouts on behalf of her commander and friend.

Shouts at Kylo, “We trusted you!  _ I _ trusted you!”  _ I told you I would kill you. I told you I’d kill you if you hurt him _ . An empty threat, and a ludicrous one, given who the three of them are. These three monsters, standing together on the edge of a knife. To any of the gathered jurors, the idea that Hux  _ can _ be hurt is absurd. Kylo knows it. He’s sampled their thoughts. Phasma is gagged and removed from the chamber by multiple struggling guards as she thrashes against them, still grunting muffled threats at Kylo on Hux’s behalf.

Kylo’s eyes turn back to Hux, seated in his chair, and Kylo connects with Hux’s mind almost on instinct - he usually does, when Hux is visibly distraught - and then recoils instantly back into himself, physically nauseated. There’s no one living or dead that Hux hates more than Brendol. He hates his own scarce similarities to his father, even the ones that serve him. When Imperials would praise their shared ruthlessness Hux always struggled to accept the compliments. They burned him like xenoboric acid. Now, the entire court is rife with whispers comparing Armitage Hux and the elder Brendol. The Brendol and Armitage that the galaxy at large knows — the Commandant who imprisoned a Resistance starpilot and forced himself on her, and the Starkiller.

Kylo doesn’t have to touch Hux’s mind again to feel his anguish. Sharp terror and dull, aching self-doubt roll off him in cloying waves that make Kylo dizzy. The room seems to tilt. His extremities feel strange, like the floor has dropped out from under him. He knows that Rey and Finn can feel it too. Finn claps a hand to his face as if blocking a rancid smell, which is an apt enough description for it. A Force-smell, and that’s a variety the nose can’t adapt to. Kylo almost likes it: the ‘scent’ of trauma. He’s smelled it many times, under more triumphant circumstances. He hates it now. Kylo forces himself to reconnect with Hux. He can feel Hux wavering between outrage and bone-deep horror, his steel trap of a mind turning over his own memories, inspecting them for faults. Hux can’t feel his seat or the binders on his wrists anymore, gone numb, just as he projected out to every Force user in the room.

_ It’s not true. It’s not true. Is it? _ Hux replays every hallway glance. Every time he teased. Hux delighted in flustering Ren, overwhelming him. That’s true. He pushed the man. Prodded at him, searching for somewhere soft to sink a blade in. Ren did the same. It was equal! Of course, Hux ended up sinking something else into Ren, into those soft bits. Ren liked it! More than that. Ren loved it, just as much as Hux did.  _ Didn’t he? _ They writhed together nearly every night, Ren moaning too loud. Too big, too loud - Ren carried those traits into Hux’s bed. Ren had begged Hux for more, more than once. Hadn’t he? And did that matter? Hux wracks his brain, trying to distill years of interaction, sexual and not, into something quantifiable. A simple weight that will tip the scale up or down. There’s nothing simple about it. About any of this.

His memory blurs. Hux has never doubted himself like this. He’s off balance. It’s not that Hux is opposed to doing harm on a mass scale. Of course not. He’s the Starkiller, after all. Pain and destruction are tools. Wielded with skill, those tools bring order. An instant of suffering in exchange for lasting peace. But to be told that he has harmed in this specific way, the same needless cruelty that Hux abhorred in Brendol... All of Hux’s cruelty serves a purpose. Or so he had thought, holding himself upright that way. He knows he’s a monster. But not the same type. A better one. A righteous one. Except that now, with the court clamoring around him and Kylo staring down at Hux’s bound and prison-clothed self, angelic and unscarred in cream robes and with his hair pulled back, showing off those big boyish ears....

Kylo always shuddered when Hux licked and sucked at those ears, running his tongue hot along the oversized shell of them and then sucking the lobe into his mouth, worrying it with his teeth. They were shudders of desire, weren’t they? And every time Kylo shivered beneath Hux, crying out with every thrust Hux took deep inside his trembling body, what then? It hadn’t been...fear. Kylo never feared Hux, no more than Hux feared him.

Hux’s mind turned itself in circles, the same pathways of thought that had been clear and organized even after the destruction of Starkiller crumbling now. It was more than the suggestion that Hux had groomed another officer, which in itself offended his self-image. It was that Hux found himself accused of taking advantage of  _ Kylo _ . Of coercing him. This one man who had ever touched Hux gently. Who had held him and stroked him when Hux woke sweaty and cold from the clutches of a nightmare. Who Hux had held in much the same way, petting his black hair absently and murmuring words the proud General could never bring himself to say outside the protective membrane of the witching hour.

_ We were equals _ , Hux thinks, trying to convince himself of it. It’s mostly true. They two had been equals alone at the top of the Order, until the end of Snoke. In that sudden power vacuum, it had been Kylo who triumphed so briefly. And now it is Hux who will pay for it, for Kylo’s dealings as Supreme Leader.

_ It will be okay, _ Kylo tells himself, and Hux’s green eyes snap to his. He’s still in Hux’s mind, of course. Familiar anger blooms where horror was -  _ you might have warned me, _ Hux fumes. Immediately trusting, waiting on Kylo’s grand scheme. Kylo hopes this trust is not misplaced. Hux still looks pained, and Kylo knows it's not completely an act. It will get worse before it gets better. Rey is approaching to verify the truth of Kylo’s statements. He clenches his fist, willing himself to remember to get Hux out.

And then Kylo breathes in, breathes out, and sears his own memories to ash. He warps them like the curled remnants of ancient burnt tomes. Turning the pleasure of Hux stretching him open into pain. Turning tender kisses sour, the comfort of an embrace in the night into just another clawed nightmare. He loosens his grip and offers a hand to Rey. She takes it in her smaller one, concentrating, rifling through the twisted horrors Kylo has made of his life’s only comfort.

“True,” she says.

Kylo breathes out. He looks down at Hux again and his skin prickles, a hideous chill running down his spine. Those eyes beguiled him. Those skinny arms held him down each night for years and Kylo could not find the strength within him to resist. Physically, it was there, of course. Kylo has always been strong. But he’d been so long degraded, so used…. He can’t quite remember why he must help this man, only another tormentor of his in a long line of them. But the feeling is strong.

Court is adjourned for the day. It will resume in the morning. Poe claps Kylo on the shoulder on their way out the door. “Sorry, Ben. Stars, I’m sorry. He’ll get what’s coming to him, yeah?”

“Yeah,” says Kylo watching the ex-General be led away by guards behind a transparisteel barrier. Back to his cell. He ought to rot there, shouldn’t he? Kylo can’t bring himself to care about five trillion lives.  Again, like a nudge at the base of his skull -- Kylo has got to get Hux out of here. Kylo bites his lip, thinking, watching Hux’s form retreat. At least then he could pay Hux back personally for seven years of misery, seven years of styling Kylo as his unwilling lover. Even Kylo Ren was not that monstrous.

**Author's Note:**

> TW:  
> Mentioned execution - Hux believes firmly that he is to be executed. This does not explicitly happen nor does anyone else allude to it as a possibility.  
> Rape/non-con - Kylo claims that Hux groomed him to explain away their past sexual relationship and maintain his own innocence. The implied false assaults are never described.
> 
> I hate this, I hate this so much, but here it is. For a twitfic, it suffices. If you need cheering up (I do!) just know that when Kylo eventually gets Hux out and takes a peek at Hux's memories, those will ring true and he'll realize his own fabricated ones are false.


End file.
